Tag: taxi

Eisha Jain, a fellow at Georgetown Law Center, has posted on SSRN an important and (to us) alarming article about the extent to which mere arrests are beginning to play the same kind of screening role outside the criminal justice system as convictions. In “Arrests as Regulation,” to be published in the Stanford Law Review in the spring, Jain argues that arrests are increasingly being used systematically as a sorting and screening tool by noncriminal actors (including immigration authorities, landlords, employers, schools and child welfare agencies), not because they are the best tool but because they are easy and inexpensive to access.

I went to college, and practiced law, with Dan Ackman, an outstanding New York lawyer who represents taxi drivers in a variety of contexts. One of his cases, pending in the Southern District of New York, Nnebe v. Daus, challenges the TLC’s alleged practice of automatic license suspension a upon arrest for a felony or specified misdemeanor, and automatic revocation upon conviction, even if the charges had no temporal, physical or logical relationship to driving a cab. The Second Circuit previously held that automatic revocation was constitutional, but directed a trial on whether the post-deprivation hearing was sufficient. The case was remanded, tried, and is now pending a decision before Judge Sullivan. The case has important implications for collateral consequences; mere arrests should not be the basis for any important decision, other than an inquiry into the actual facts, and even a conviction for an unrelated offense should not be the basis for license revocation.

The background checking policies of Uber and other ride-sharing companies like Lyft and Sidecar are again in the news, after an Uber driver with an extensive criminal record allegedly raped a female passenger in New Delhi. Other horror stories of cab rides from hell with these popular “taxi aggregators” are surfacing. The New York Times reports that background check requirements for taxi drivers vary widely by jurisdiction, but are “generally more rigorous” than the sketchy services used by Uber and its competitors, and “usually include searches of private databases like F.B.I. records.” (Note to self: Must inform the “paper of record” that the FBI records system is not a “private database.”)

Uber et al. have so far successfully resisted most legislative efforts to require them to perform particular kinds of background checks using particular kinds of background checkers, using the good offices of well-connected lobbyists to avoid this annoying speed bump on their road to a public offering. But episodes like the New Delhi rape, and lawsuits for misleading consumers about the kinds of checks they do, may bring them around to a more responsible position. Read more